Because a hooded sweatshirt, which according to the Orange Juice Blog’s sources is now to be referred to as a “hodie” — correction, “hoodie” (yes, all right, that does make more sense) — is, along with being a fashion (or an anti-fashion) statement and (the Orange Juice Blog imagines, kids being what they are) a cultural statement and often an advertisement for an educational institution, celebrity, or other brand, it may be easily overlooked that it is also and primarily an article of clothing.

(Yes, that was a run-on sentence, used to comic effect. Chill.) This hoodie, it keeps you warm, protects you from the environment, intervenes between your skin and the nettles and pebbles and drafts and irritating chemical substances of life.

OJ Blog Hoodies. Not available in stores. Or, so far as we know, elsewhere.

This guy, this Farhad Manjoo of Slate (though I’ve crossed paths with him since his days back on Salon), whom I consider a fairly irritating technology reporter but who also seems to be right about things a good deal of the time (and I imagine that that’s just the sort of reaction he likes to get), wrote this piece today on hoodies and — and this is the only reason it warrants comment in this blog, of course — quality of goods and American manufacturing. It could well be considered an extended product ad — but if so, it’s a good one, and it’s one worth your reading.

The article is called “This Is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made: How American Giant created the best sweatshirt known to man” — and, well, damn! It gives me hope. And at the end, being me, I’m going to get a little political about it. Enough with the stylistic affectation? OK then!

Manjoo starts off with this — and then you’re just going to have to read the rest by yourself.

Early in October, I got a call from Bayard Winthrop, an entrepreneur who claimed to have created the world’s best hooded sweatshirt. Because I found this claim amusing—who sets out to make the world’s best hoodie?—I agreed to chat with him about the sweatshirt and his company, a San Francisco-based apparel startup called American Giant.

I thought it would be a polite interview that would go nowhere, but I quickly found American Giant’s story irresistible. For one thing, Winthrop had figured out a way to do what most people in the apparel industry consider impossible: He’s making clothes entirely in the United States, and he’s doing so at costs that aren’t prohibitive. American Apparel does something similar, of course, but not especially profitably, and its clothes are very low quality. Winthrop, on the other hand, has found a way to make apparel that harks back to the industry’s heyday, when clothes used to be made to last. “I grew up with a sweatshirt that my father had given me from the U.S. Navy back in the ’50s, and it’s still in my closet,” he told me. “It was this fantastic, classic American-made garment—it looks better today than it did 35, 40 years ago, because like an old pair of denim, it has taken on a very personal quality over the years.”

But few companies make sweatshirts—or any clothes, really—like that today. In the 1970s, when the fashion industry morphed into a mass-market business dominated by mall stores, its marketing and distribution costs began to skyrocket. To keep retail prices down, companies began to shrink the price of producing clothes. Today, when you buy a hooded sweatshirt, most of your money is going to the retailer, the brand, and the various buyers that shuttle the garment between the two. The item itself costs very little to make—a $50 hoodie at the Gap likely costs about $6 or $7 to produce at an Asian manufacturing facility.

This cheap lousiness is, as Inge noted earlier this week, the sort of suck on the economy and the national soul that, well, sucks. But is there an alternative? Apparently, for hoodies, so. Winthrop — a design guy from Apple and the medical technology field — decided to make hoodies with the meticulousness and care for design demonstrated in those companies, and seems to have come up with something really cool. Indeed, something cool and warm.

The story details the durability and wearability of the product, by the latter of which I mean both how one wears it and how (and if unlike me you’re not a fan of faded jeans, avert your eyes) it wears over time. That is, it just gets softer and suppler and more comfortable. Rather than “planned obsolescence,” it’s “planned perseverance.”

But what interests me more (well, as much, because I really like the well-constructed sweatshirts of days gone by) is the way it talks about manufacturing — here in America. The fawned-over company provides secent jobs, requiring skill and supervision and interaction with designers, and then sells them direct to consumers via the Internet. The company makes more, the factory makes more, the employees make more, the middlemen make … well, except for UPS or whatever, they don’t actually exist.

So I looked at this start-up south of the San Francisco airport and asked myself “what do they have that we don’t have?” The answer, I think is: a head start — and that’s all.

We could manufacture good — great, if you believe Manjoo — apparel like this here. Orange County is as well-placed in Southern California as the ancient Persia was on the Silk Road and Spice Trail between Europe and South and East Asia. We’re the 3-million-population nexus between 10 million people in LA, 3 million in San Diego, and 4 million in the Inland Empire. We’ve got a talented immigrant population and an underemployed native population. We’ve even got decent labor laws that, when enforced, can stave off our fears about contributing to contemporary slavery. And we have two other things as well — and those two things combined are: a way to prime a market.

The first thing we have is: a huge population of homeless — which we’ll always have (because we’re more temperate than the rest of the country so this is a good place to go if you don’t want to die from the elements). The second is, although apparently we don’t want to admit it, wealth.

Now I’m not saying that we should waste public money “pampering” (which would not be my choice of words) the homeless. No, I’m saying that we should figure out how much we spend on the homeless and see if we can deliver a better product for less social cost. My suggestion now has not gone through the appropriate rigorous vetting process to determine whether it would actually serve a social need in the best way possible (that process also being known as “ask Dwight Smith”), but even if it didn’t pass that muster, it’s an example of questions we should ask.

If a sweatshirt or hoodie would last, if it could be personalized (even with Magic Marker) to protect against theft, to allow homeless to sleep more comfortably in a wider variety of spaces because they won’t be as cold, if providing a better product to them saves us money as a society, and if the prospect of being able to produce such a product for an always-needy group meant that we could help to prime the pump for domestic manufacturing, exactly why would we not do that?

Once the brilliant design work is done — and yes, some people (like Mr. Winthrop) are going to get paid for that (or else may get charitable deductions or social recognition that is actually more likely to be satisfying than one’s eighty-fourth million dollars) — then the actual manufacturing is not exactly brain surgery. And so that’s the final thing I wondered as I read Manjoo’s article:

If this sort of manufacturing were to be done here, could it be done by the government (with wages set low enough, say as part of a deal with local business and design schools for placements for recent grads, as not to become an overcompensated sinecure for friends of public officials — as conservatives rightly condemn and some of us liberals do as well), or would we have to make sure that some investor gets a healthy profit out of it? Which one is the real “giveaway,” once we decide that this sort of thing? The former could be described as “socialism” — but with the processes set out in advance by wise capitalists who are using them elsewhere, it would seem to lack much of the peril associated with that term. (And, even if it had deficiencies, they would not necessarily be ones cured by making sure that some investor got rich over them.)

So could high-quality hoodies for the homeless be one of those cases where everyone wins? It’s a heady proposition.

About Greg Diamond

Prolix worker's rights and government accountability attorney. General Counsel of CATER, the Coalition of Anaheim Taxpayers for Economic Responsibility, a non-partisan group of people sick of local corruption.
Deposed as Northern Vice Chair of DPOC in April 2014 when his anti-corruption and pro-consumer work in Anaheim infuriated the Building Trades and Teamsters in spring 2014, who then worked with the lawless and power-mad DPOC Chair to eliminate his internal oversight.
Runs for office sometimes, so far to offer a challenge to someone nasty who would otherwise have run unopposed. Someday he might pick a fight intending to win it rather than just to dent someone. You'll know it when you see it.
None of his pre-putsch writings ever spoke for the Democratic Party at the local, county, state, national, or galactic level.
A family member works part-time as a campaign treasurer. He doesn't directly profit from that relatively small compensation and it doesn't affect his coverage. (He does not always favor her clients, though she might hesitate to take one that he hated. He does advise some local campaigns informally and generally without compensation. If that changes, he will declare the interest.
He also runs a less frequently published blog called "The Brean," for his chosen hometown, where he is now fighting with its wealthiest and most avaricious citizen-donors. This just seems to be his way.

Greg, I think what Cook is implying (as I read it, maybe not…) is somewhat as follows: Someone who may not know you background could easily surmise that you were going to take advantage of the homeless in order to be able to make a product. Presumably you may not pay them a livable wage with full health/dental/vision and a funded defined benefit pension plan. Hence, someone could read it and think you were just another greedy corporate money monger. Again, since I know your philosophy (or at least where your intentions lean), I know that is not true but if it was another author it could be assumed that the hoodies would be made by the blood sweat and tears of a group without as much of a voice as another group.

The relationship with the lead based die is indicating that if you are going to cut corners by paying the homeless anything less than a livable wage and full benefits that you might as well also use the lead based die also…that is until the workers unionize and then all bets are off.

I didn’t presume that the hoodies would be made by the homeless themselves — that would be great if they had the skills. In any event, the factory that this company uses doesn’t sound like a sweatshop and “not a sweatshop” is certainly what I think it’s fair to demand.

Boutwell

Posted December 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM

Greg, do you have any information on the manufacturer? I did not really read anything about the working conditions or pay/benefits for the workers at the factory (does not seem to be owned by AG), but maybe I am missing something. I would like to think it is not a sweatshop also, but unsure so maybe you read something I did not. There is a picture of about 40+ smiling workers on their website, but that is about it that I can find either on AG’s site or from general web searches. I am sure that the factory is doing cut/sew work for other non-AG orders also…do you have anything?

Wow…I blew that one- example of lack of reading comprehension I guess. More likely I was projecting what I would do…set up a local manufacturing company with a labor pool that could use a job, wages, benefits, and training. They would also get the step up that they may need to secure housing- a socially just cause IMO. Somewhat like Homeboy Industries but for the homeless. The manufacturing costs are around $12 to make the AG product (not sure if that is fully burdended or just the cost of goods sold before G&A costs). I can’t imagine you guys would be opposed to generating jobs for the homeless and not just the garment.

Sorry again about the lack of comprehension…although, it could be a double win: provide the homeless with a job so that hopefully they are no longer homeless and then provide the homeless a great garment to keep them warm.

Demagogue

Posted December 7, 2012 at 9:43 PM

I think that a lot of people are mistaken about who the homeless people are, and think that they are usually employable.

Many are Vets suffering from PTSD.

Many are mentally ill that really belong in a hospital or half-way house situation.

A lot are drug/alcohol dependent.

If you think that this segment of our population just needs a hot shower, a shave, and some new clothes….and a more positive attitude, well, you’re not being realistic. Maybe for some of them, but most have lifelong issues that are going to get in the way of them sewing sweatshirts for a living.

I do like Greg’s idea of providing them with a quality made garment to help make their hard scrabble life a bit easier. I guess that makes me a liberal/progressive.

Boutwell

Posted December 7, 2012 at 10:57 PM

I am happy to say that I agree 100% with pretty much every word you just said Demo. My thought on having them in a manufacturing situation would also include addressing the issues that are systemic in their life situation of homelessness…just as with Homeboy Industry or Mental Health Assoc (in LB area I believe), jobs along with providing of other non-monetary needs can have great impact when done properly.

I guess maybe I too would be labeled a liberal/progressive by the measurement of providing the homeless a well made garment.

Demagogue

Posted December 8, 2012 at 8:40 AM

How about “compassionate conservative”?

Your financial advice is certainly conservative, which is often very good, and your heart is open to helping those less fortunate. Not a bad mix.

Boutwell

Posted December 8, 2012 at 10:30 AM

I would agree…I definitely lean financially conservative and socially mid to even liberal on certain items (with a financial concern). Most importantly, I at least feel that I can see both ends of the spectrum no matter where I sit.

What a great company story…hopefully they make it. I wish I could justify spending $85 for their full zip hoodie…but even if I could, I could not get one now (they are sold out). Even if I wanted to shell out the $75 for a no zip hoodie, I could not get one either. I could get a $95 half zip though. Looks like very high qualify stuff and by the way that some of the items are sold out, perhaps the demand is there for it.

Would love to know more about their financial condition, but I doubt we will know much more any time soon. Is the owner taking compensation for example or is he wealthy enough from his prior ventures that he just really wants to make this work (very noble and why a lot of people want to strike it hard with a venture). It certainly can be done and hopefully they succeed and can share their secret sauce with others.

I wonder if their cut and sew facility’s employees are unionized or not and hopefully they are taken care of on the benefits side and have increasing wages in the future. I also wonder what those workers would think when they realize that AG is making making twice as much profit per sweatshirt as Levi’s (AG is entitled to make it, but wonder if that is a greedy corporation or not)- $30 for AG versus $15 for Levi’s. Hopefully they high five each other and feel secure in their future. They have found the direct to consumer model beneficial that others have also found to be an effective way of curtailing costs. Cut out the store and ship direct to the consumer…seems to be working if I can judge by not being able to buy a hoodie right now. The brick and mortar retail store worker would not be too happy with AG in that the product is not contributing to their direct employment…they are circumventing the established sales process of years gone-by and it will continue to go that direction. I am curious what the average wage of the cut and sew employee is, especially including benefits.

Greg you have an interesting idea for creating workers out of the homeless and also letting them benefit from the product that they are making. Although, my gut would tell me that you would not only have the homeless applying for the cut and sew positions (or other slots you would need) but also people who are not in their situation- it is good for the community to have jobs though regardless of who is getting them.

Way to go AG…maybe I will save up for a new hoodie since I have not bought one in a very very long time and hopefully by then they are caught up with production.